Extreme Death Penalties don't make people learn to play, it just makes them do things so carefully that it becomes boring as hell. When I played EQ the entire leveling process was getting a group, standing in a spot for a spawn, killing the spawn, then repeating. Why? No risk, because people didn't actually want risks.

Most people don't play games for risk, they just want something they can log on and waste some enjoyable time. Those that do want risk are a minority and have other places they can go for that junk.

I think increasing the death penalty would a deterrent to people being careless, afk, etc... However, it would be very tough to balance. Every class would need "get out of combat" abilities (like FD, etc...), or those abilities would need to be removed from the game. Fear of failure also limits progress. So Blizz would have to dumb down encounters even more than they are now.

Overall, I don't think the balancing act would be worth the effort.

If the goal is to improve people's engagement in group activities, then there are many other ways to do that without making the death penatly more than it is today.

Yes, the penalty should be harsher. I think we should all be hooked up to an apparatus a la the Matrix and every time we experience a death in-game we are knocked unconscious for the amount of time it would have taken to get back to the spirit rezzer while awake. Also, you lose an article of clothing.

I think increasing the death penalty would a deterrent to people being careless, afk, etc...

I can already imagine the fun people would have with it. Remember the priests deathgripping people into the sea at Deathwing. Healers letting hated subjects die on purpose. People kiting mobs to other players and then feign or invis. Kiting rare mobs to hubs where afk players sit, just to get them 1shot by Blade Flurry or Rain Dance etc.

These so called hardcore players have no idea that even a fraction of their suggestions would kill WoW.

First NO, the current death pentalty is enough,.
Second...I like to play the game and not wait hours just because I died (the current grinding is almost bad enough but thankfully it isn't necessary)
Finally..You know why WoW is popular, it is because the people in Blizzard understood back then that stupid things as hard death penalty's ruined the game, so the focus has always been that in principle every person could just log and just raid or do pvp (you may not be the best but it is possible).

Someone clearly never played EverQuest, as others have mentioned. Death meant losing experience, possibly de-leveling, having to run back from your bind point to your body (no matter how far away it was, even if it was on another continent), making that run completely naked, possibly never even getting your stuff back at all and having to start from scratch, possibly dying again and losing even more experience and de-leveling in every attempt to get your first corpse... ahh, I miss those wonderful days... said no one. XD Okay, I'm sure some people thought it was intense and challenging, but otherwise it simply meant you played everything beyond safe. You pulled one at a time, you waited until everyone was completely full on health and mana each time, you just sat in the safest place possible grinding for hours on end on weak trash.

And for a game as massive as WoW, no, penalties do not lead to interesting gameplay. They just make you more pissed off when bad stuff happens, and screw you completely when you group with people you're not familiar with who don't kill or maliciously want to see you lose some exp and laugh at you. I quit EQ because I became absolutely obsessed with getting the "legendary" (I don't even remember the proper term for it now) priest mace that could cast the res that gave back a player 90% of the exp they lost.

Death penalties do not necessarily make people play better, but they definitely make them play slower.

It's fits the game well enough, but there is no denying that death penalty is practically nonexistent in WoW.

Originally Posted by Lilly32

I never thought of this. This is the best alternative to corpse looting and still makes dying in PvP bad. Right now BGs are just zerg fests and no one cares about dying cause you lose nothing but buffs. This is a great idea wish they would add it.

This would probably end up with many people focusing solely on looting the corpses. I don't think that this would be a good change on its own. It might also have other negative effects on the players' behaviour in battlegrounds.

Originally Posted by Voyager

I can already imagine the fun people would have with it. Remember the priests deathgripping people into the sea at Deathwing. Healers letting hated subjects die on purpose. People kiting mobs to other players and then feign or invis. Kiting rare mobs to hubs where afk players sit, just to get them 1shot by Blade Flurry or Rain Dance etc.

All things said and done, that actually sounds like fun to me. I wouldn't even mind being the victim if it made the world more lively and dangerous.

Ultimately a good change for the game? I expect a majority of the players to disagree. Big death penalties are more of a sandbox RPG feature and WoW is (still) very far from that.

I come home from work, chill playing my favorite game - WoW. I move out of the City on my server and am instantly killed by a 40 man raid of griefers (think Dark Portal style groups - you know it would happen). There goes my relaxation time?

Let's say instead I queue for a BG, I have pretty good PVP gear so I kill this one undergeared priest 11 times. He's now got XXX less honor than he had before entering and is lower level/poorer/debuffed/whatever? Just because he had the misfortune of getting queued against an overgeared player in a BG.

Or maybe I do a dungeon, i'm a tank so when the healer slips on spilt tea and suddenly stops healing and I die. Now I have a penalty? Really?